So many names, so much suffering, began to take a toll on Cam, annexing her nights and dreams. I was patient, hoping that, like a fever, it would soon subside. But when she ran out of kidnappers, and started adding scientists and abettors, middlemen and clergymen—can you believe what this missionary Sam Philips Verner did to his Congolese pygmy?—I decided to confront her.
If Downey had been unsuccessful in finding others like his daughter with all the resources at his disposal, what chance did she have of accomplishing anything different?
“Oh, he’s probably found them,” she said dismissively. “But he can’t appeal to victims like you can, not with a daughter who killed herself, not if he did not protect her. They’d react as we have—wanting nothing to do with him.”
She was feeding the fax machine with a request to Barry Cunningham’s agents to pursue potential genealogical links to a series of suspects. On the list was a certain R. A. Cunningham who had snatched groups of aborigines from Australia to sell them to Barnum and Bailey—“Ha, maybe our detective will discover that he descends from this guy who’s responsible for those poor people ending up destitute in Drew’s Dime Museum, wouldn’t that be insane!” Always on the trail, my Cam, that hadn’t changed—forgetting each morning that a few hours earlier I’d been forced to wake her from a storm of nightmares.
“So let’s say,” I persisted, “that the faraway progeny, the sixth generation, results from the coupling of some eminent kidnapper of a victim and some equally eminent photographer, what then? Hi, I’m Cam Foster-Wood. My husband has your syndrome. This happened after he masturbated, so I’m wondering, sir, miss, about your first sexual experience? No problems with photos? Oh, my mistake, sorry to have intruded on your life. But say you did stumble upon someone like me, what’s next? Would you care to join forces with us? Join you, ma’am, to do exactly what? I doubt you’ve even started to figure out a plausible response, right?”
She didn’t seem to listen to a word I’d said. “Oh, Fitz, don’t you see that they have to be the key to what’s ailing you, how it happened. Don’t you see? If there’s only one of you, it can be a fluke. If there are two, like you and the Downey girl, it can be an accident. But with more cases, a pattern can be established, bio-historical causes can be tested, a deterrent discovered.”
“Didn’t you say that the deterrent was to draw closer to Henri, particularly in a year as significant as 1992?”
“Keep at it,” Cam said. “We’ll be working on parallel tracks. Until our paths meet up. I’m sure of it. Here, look at this photo.”
I looked. Several jet-black African women looked back at me. Sticking out from their mouths were colossal labrets, plate-like lips larger than cocktail trays, offensively, shockingly, derisively jutting forth. While white women, tourists, posed for the camera, their polished, manicured nails probing those dark, alien faces.
“How many creatures just like these were exhibited, Fitz, give it your best guess. Twenty-five thousand,” she rushed to answer her own question. “And each captive was burnt on some retina, each and every one is seeking a host. Henri and Krao may just be the tip of the iceberg, the scouts who spy out the lay of the land before the major invasion. I can’t let Downey get to them before I do, I won’t.”
I shivered. Rather than the woman who had spoken lovingly of Henri and his plight, she suddenly sounded more like Downey, as if, in a twisted way, she had started competing with him. She hadn’t seemed to mind in Paris when he had been chasing some vague idea of transmission of visual memory through the generations or via saliva, but once Cunningham’s detectives had revealed Downey’s private stake in this investigation, Cam must have taken it as an affront and a challenge. As if he was violating her exclusive territory, which by virtue of my existence and our relationship belonged to her and no one else.
It was true that she wished to find the brothers and sisters, far-flung and near, Bedouins and Dakota and dwarfs from Okinawa, who accompanied Henri from the darkness of the past. It was true that she grieved for their uprooted lives. And true that she hoped to alleviate the malady of their young victims. But her deepest and fiercest desire sprang from the need to beat Downey at his own game.
The fact that Downey had at his beck and call so many assets, corporate and governmental, seemed to spur her on. She felt that advantage to be somehow unfair, unsporting, an outrage directed at her personally—and was determined to even that lopsided playing field by exercising her outlandish talents, inhabited by the supreme self-confidence that the imagination of one human being can overcome an army of adversaries.
But watching her feed the fax machine with frenzied page after page of queries and photos and biographical data, I told myself that this explanation of a cutthroat competition was insufficient. Maybe there was something more fundamentally wrong with her, maybe all this time she had been as flawed as I was, only without a visitor to make the condition manifest. Or maybe that debris from the Berlin Wall had affected her more than either of us allowed and she had been, in effect, amnesiac all through those two years. I could picture her awakening in that first light of 1992 with that folder sprawled on the bedspread, I could see her reading those pages and sluggishly returning to her own old true self. I wouldn’t put it past her to have decided, before I myself woke up that New Year’s morning, to invent, for my benefit, that she been well and in control for the duration, always wanting to be in control, my Camilla Wood.
This much, however, was certain. If I did not rescue her now, if I let her just meander through a labyrinth of endless genealogical crisscrossings and horrific photos and atrocities, if I let Downey invade her as Henri had invaded me, I would be failing yet again, failing her and myself, and this time there might be no absolution.
From the moment we had met up again she had criticized what she called my lack of initiative, an opinion reenforced by my recent passivity during her own ailment. Whenever I ventured that she might be going overboard in the search for fellow ghosts lost in the wilderness of world history, she irrefutably answered: So what do you propose, my love?
She would soon find out.
While she ran races with Downey, I had stayed steady on the course of exploring the Kaweshkar, faithful to the idea that once we had deciphered what Henri wanted, able to look at the world with his eyes, from his eyes, a plan of action would follow.
I tried to imagine him the day he was abducted as he watched the coast recede mercilessly and then that night, the first night in the dark hold of the ship.
I decided that the women would be the first to console him. I decided that they would act as the guardians of the group’s memory, describing each rock they had lost, each island, inlet, seal fur, obsidian flint, withered shrub, scraggly tree; I decided that they would sing the landscape back into being, each word part of a net, each object like a fish in that net, each memory to be cleaned and gutted and stored and nibbled till it had become part of their collective landscape inside, the coves and the beaches and the bleached bones of a whale, and how the bite of the breeze and the drizzle of the rain below the clouds reveal when a tempest is coming, and how they used to throw stones into the sea warning the weather that they’d had enough of wretched never-ending storms. As if, with the effort of those who spoke and sang in the ship’s cavern, and the attention of those who listened and responded and repeated, through the magic dwelling of their tongue, they could shelter the stolen environment and ensure it would still be there as the distance and the miles and the waves accumulated, waiting, fluid and intact, for their footsteps and their fingers. Night after night, day after day telling and retelling each other stories of the land and the sea, the canoes and the hunt, the fire extinguished and the fire relit, like incantations against the fiends of forgetfulness, urging the adolescents not to despair, teaching the smaller children winds and words that they had hardly been able to breathe, giving them a home in the language and a home in the remembrances they shared until the day when that home could materialize out of the mists
and be touched and walked and navigated, until they could bathe themselves in the freezing currents and emerge as if reborn, as if this trip were only a bad dream that would never return. Trying not to forget their homeland so it would not forget them, the berries and the surf, the tinamou and the seasnipe and the penguins.
It was that fierce and tender resurrection of their past that opened the door for the adult males to take the young men, Henri and Pedro, under their wing. If Antonio was their father and the Capitano their leader, perhaps their shaman, they had much to impart. Perhaps that instruction had started aboard the ship, but I suspected it had really become important once they were all imprisoned behind the fences and staves of the Jardin, once they were forced to perform all manner of fraudulent ceremonies for the entertainment of those gawking Parisians. So as soon as the last show was over and the last spectators had paid their last admission fees and returned to their apartments in the shadow of the wide boulevards, the elders had whispered to the two young males what their duties should be, what genuine rituals they had missed and should be preparing for.
It made sense that they had been captured while at sea, because Hagenbeck’s agents wouldn’t have been able to find them on land, discover the caves where the Kaweshkar would have hidden. The whole group, wandering as water nomads do, in search of better fishing grounds. More likely, I resolved—and it was up to me, I had to visualize what Henri could not tell me—that a whale had foundered in one of the coves, the signal for the dispersed families to convene so that foundational rites could commence, now that meat was guaranteed for many days. Were Henri and Pedro, therefore, on their way to participate in the ceremony that would have marked their transition into manhood, had their lives, like mine, been truncated? That’s what I wanted to think, that Henri had been blocked, as I had, from the definitive rite of passage that would have made him a full member of the community, wanted to think that was the reason he had chosen me. Because it helped me to conjure up how Antonio and the Capitano had approached him with the secrets that only they knew.
Most of what the boys learned had been kept from the prying eyes of even sympathetic anthropologists and missionaries, but enough had seeped through for outsiders to divine the outlines of what ensued inside the ceremonial hut. Given their age, it was conceivable that Henri and Pedro had been through the kálakai, a first initiation for the young of both sexes that Lise would have participated in, though females would have been forbidden from the next stages, sanctioned only to bring food to the entrance of the sacred hut. Henri and Pedro, on the other hand, would already have been assigned a task, to ensure that mothers and sisters, grandmothers and daughters, did not even peep inside, scaring the women away by dancing furiously in front of them in the guise of spirits, their male bodies painted with stripes, their faces covered with leering masks. If they performed well, they soon might be invited to undergo the yinčiháua, as long as they had given proof of readiness.
Proof that he could use bow, arrow, harpoon, and fashion them from wood and clamshells. Proof that he could manufacture a canoe and build a hut and provide for a family, make fire under the rain and in a vessel that immense waves covered and spun. That he could find each crevice in the worst sleet storm and how to tell when the weather was about to turn really nasty and where one can find fresh water where the deer and guanacos and foxes would come to drink, how to forage for birds’ eggs and mollusks and erizo sea urchins without depleting them all, without stopping the cycle of regeneration. And afterward, in the hut itself, during the yinčiháua, go without eating for days, survive many hours crouched in the fetal position until his muscles cried out, as if he were in his vessel pursuing the seals that would offer meat and oil and fur, terrible trials but nothing compared to what they were subjected to on this other trip to the land of white strangers. Yes, the boy must have been trained in Paris by the two male adults in the group so that upon his return he might immediately restart his initiation at the point where it had been interrupted, pretend a miracle would deliver him.
A miracle nobody visited him with back then, that I could not give him now.
But the more I thought of Henri on the ship to Hamburg and Henri in the Jardin d’Acclimatation and Henri being photographed and paraded and Henri on a suffocating train to Berlin and Henri being examined by doctors and scientists and Henri on his way to Zurich and Henri dying alone in that hospital as Dr. Seitz tried to save him, the more I thought of what his experience might have been and his need to share with others his unfulfilled longing, the more and more I thought of Henri dreaming an alternative existence, another possible life, as the end drew near, the closer I drew to his desire and loss and expectation, the more I realized what was being asked of me.
I would go where he had been unable to journey.
South, to his birthplace.
EIGHT
“Home is where one starts from.”
—T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
That bay in Tierra del Fuego from which Henri and the others were taken, his home, that’s where we needed to be on October 12. Find his descendants and ask them what they remembered from that violent past, what the great-great-grandparents had told their children so they could tell theirs, so some trace of that suffering remained alive in memory. What did they feel, those left behind, when, from one day to the other, their loved ones suddenly disappeared, were never heard of again? Vanished, as if they had never been born. What had the four Kaweshkar who came back in 1882 related of their trip, did any of them recall Henri writhing on the floor of a Zurich hospital, drying up with dysentery, his innards burning? Did they pronounce his real name? Did anyone recall it? Had the only woman to return, Piskouna or Trine or whatever her name was, had she at least whispered something about his fate? Had Pedro, who might have been Henri’s brother? Isn’t that what brothers do?
And once the distant relatives of Henri had spoken to us, then this distant relative of Petit and Hagenbeck would speak, I’d tell them our story, we would show that the forgiveness we were asking for was not fraudulent, came from our own sorrow, my penitence for what my ancestors had done to theirs. Perhaps they would lift the curse, perhaps they had the power, perhaps there was still some healer among them who recollected how to quiet the fire of revenge, how to sing the dead into the next world, how to lay to rest the spirit of Henri. And then maybe we could help them in a more concrete way, create a foundation in my visitor’s name for the last survivors of the Kaweshkar ethnic group, finance a museum for their objects, pay lawyers to demand reparations, something, anything, anything to atone.
Among the books I had laboriously read in Spanish about the Alakaluf, as they were insistently called, was one delving into their spiritual world that I particularly treasured. The author was a historian by the name of Frano Vudarovic, who taught at the local university in Punta Arenas.
Would he appreciate my writing to him in his native Spanish, however stilted mine might be, awkward, excessively formal, scattered with grammatical errors? My hope was that he’d appreciate that effort as proof of my sincerity—important, as so much of what I’d be telling him was deceitful. On a recent trip to Paris, I wrote, my wife and I had come upon a postcard of a striking young Indian (I included a photocopy of the carte). Because we couldn’t forget his features, and above all his haunting eyes, we had spent many months tracing the subject’s ultimate fate, su destino. After briefly summarizing this young Patagonian’s voyage and death, I asked Professor Vudarovic if he might provide us with information regarding any possible living relatives of this man who had been called Henri by his captors, as we were interested in contacting them to see if a ceremony might be performed to help his soul find some respite, given that his body probably couldn’t be found and buried. I enclosed a self-addressed, prepaid express mail envelope for any possible response.
It came back five days later.
Written in impeccable English.
Dear Mr. Foster:
As you may know, the Kaweshkar believe�
�or at least did, when there were enough of them alive to believe in something collectively—that the soul is made of air. Xolás, their Supreme Being, breathes that soul into the body at the moment of birth. When the body, a mere perishable creation of the parents, dies, the soul lifts up, light as the wind, rides up and ever up into the stars and beyond, where the vast hut of Xolás serves as the abode of the dead. When the soul arrives at the enormous door above which Xolás presides, it is overcome with trembling and shame and swears, even if this is not so—“I have not done anything really bad.”
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